were offered for the dead lest haply any vagrom ghost should be tempted to revisit his old home or make entry into the house of some other person.[112] The atheist Bion, as atheists use, when he was dying clutched at any superstition and asked for boughs of buckthorn and branches of laurel to be attached to the door to keep out death.[113] It should be remarked that the old Greek custom is widely practised among the peasantry of Europe to-day, and in Fletcher’s The Faithfull Shepherdesse,[114] II, when Clorin is sorting her herbs she says:
these rhamnus’ branches are,
Which, stuck in entries, or about the bar
That holds the door fast, kill all enchantments, charms—
Were they Medea’s verses—that do harms
To men or cattie.
Fanshaw in his elegant translation[115] has:
Hi rami sunt mollis Acanthi,
Qui si uestibulis aut postibus affigantur,
Unde fores pendent, incantamenta repellunt
Omnia, pestiferæ facient licet ilia Medeæ,
Quae laedunt homines pecudesue.
In Dalmatia and Albania for the wooden stake is sometimes substituted a consecrated dagger, a poniard which has been laid upon the altar and ritually blessed by the priest with due sacring of holy orison, of frankincense and lustral asperges.
It is highly important that the body of the Vampire should be transfixed by a single blow, for two blows or three would restore it to life. This curious idea is almost universally found in tradition and folk-lore.[116] In The Thousand and One Nights (Burton, Vol. VII, p. 361) we have the story of “Sayf-al-Muluk and Badion al Jamal” where the hero cuts the ghoul in half by a single stroke through the waist. The ghost yells at him: “Oman, an thou desire to slay me, strike me a second stroke.” The youth is just about to give the second slash with his scimitar when a certain old blind beggar whom he has befriended warns him. “Smite not a second time, for then will he not die, but will live and destroy us.” He accordingly stays his hand and the ghoul expires.
Among Galland’s manuscripts was a tale of the three sons of the Sultan of Samarcand. In the course of various adventures the third son, Badialzaman engages in a contest with the Djin Morhagean. The youngest daughter of the
